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At One With the Earth, and the Clients

Rob HarrisEmily Niehaus, center. the executive director of Community Rebuilds, visited Eric Boxrud and Nancy Morlock in their straw bale home, which was completed last spring.

The skeleton of the straw bale house has risen with remarkable speed. In little more than a week, we framed out the walls and almost finished the roof. Now there is no doubt that a house is coming into being, although at this point it is not obvious that it will be anything out of the ordinary. The trained eye will notice the lack of the evenly spaced studs that are normally needed to hang drywall, as well as the presence of a second set of wooden sill plates to support the inside edge of the 18-inch-thick straw bales.

We work with the tools of a conventional framing crew: hammer, pneumatic framing gun, tape measure and circular saw. My hands are starting to develop calluses and my body is getting stronger. I now have five raw spots on my hands, and at the end of the day I am physically exhausted. It’s awesome.

At the end of one work day, Allison VanLonkhuyzen, the woman who will move into the home we are building, came by with a cooler of homemade beers as a treat for the crew. Ours is the fourth home built by a volunteer crew with Community Rebuilds, and Allison is the fourth homeowner to take advantage of its affordable housing model.

From the Ground Up

“I feel like if it wasn’t green; if it wasn’t the sustainable living, I don’t think I would have been as interested,” she said. “It’s a ton of money. It’s a huge loan.”

Real estate in Moab is expensive for a small town because it’s a popular destination for mountain bikers, rafters, jeepers and all kinds of outdoor adventurers. But some of the adventurers who end up settling here don’t have much money and eke out a living in the tourism industry.

Allison makes $15 an hour as a park ranger in Arches National Park. In the last few years she has also worked as a waitress, a hike leader and a Transportation Security Administration employee at the regional airport to make ends meet.

Eric Boxrud and Nancy Morlock, the couple who live in the Community Rebuilds straw bale house built last spring, together earn less than $30,000 a year as mountain bike guides. “It was above and beyond our expectations about what affordable housing could look like,” Nancy said. “It feels like it was tailored to us.”

Affordable housing options in Moab tend to be doublewide trailers that were hastily constructed during the uranium mining boom of the 1940s and ’50s, before enforcement of building codes took hold in 1976. Because of those homes’ shoddy construction, banks now won’t finance pre-1976 trailers, according to Emily Niehaus, the executive director of Community Rebuilds.

When she worked as a bank loan officer, Emily says, she continually found herself saying no to people. Homeowners with old trailers could not get loans to fix them up, and people looking to buy one could not get loans to buy them. At the same time, they were expensive to heat and cool through the 100-degree summer days and below-freezing winter nights of the Utah desert.

Laurel Hagen, who owns the second Community Rebuilds straw bale home, says she used to pay a $500 monthly gas bill to heat her old trailer. In her new, super-insulated house, her heating bill is around $25 a month.

Sasha Pasler and Colleen Jarrett moved out of a trailer and into their passive solar straw bale house in December 2010. They went from burning three cords of wood in the winter to just half a cord in the straw bale house. In the summers, they went from running their swamp cooler constantly (most houses in Moab use this more efficient technology rather than traditional air conditioners, which suck moisture out of the air) to leaving it off for days on end.

Locally, “it was so extreme temperaturewise, a lot of people in town got so in debt from utility bills,” Colleen said. The pre-1976 trailers also tend to be full of old linoleum, carpeting, particle board and other manufactured building materials that emit unhealthy gases.

Emily said the idea of Community Rebuilds evolved as a solution to Moab’s housing stock problems: the shortage of affordable housing, the need to get rid of the old trailers and a lack of builders skilled in sustainable construction practices.

Critical to the success of the organization was finding financing that was affordable enough that low-income families could tear down the old trailers and build something better in their place. This financing came in the form of United States Department of Agriculture rural development loans. Emily helps potential homeowners through the process of applying for these low-interest, subsidized mortgages.

The mortgage, which runs for 33 years, covers both the land and the cost of building the house. Eric and Nancy’s is typical. They borrowed $183,000 from the U.S.D.A. at 3.25 percent interest: $92,000 for the land and $91,000 for construction, including landscaping. A government subsidy knocks almost $200 off their monthly mortgage payment, so the monthly bill, including homeowners insurance and property taxes, ends up at $709.

At a cost of just under $80 a square foot, they ended up with a 1,150-square-foot straw bale home with custom natural features like adobe floors embedded with radiant heating, a handmade Moroccan lime plaster, or tadelakt, bathtub, a metal roof and hand-troweled earthen plaster walls.

Then there’s the house for which nine interns, including my wife and me, are now donating the labor. Eric Plourde, the Community Rebuilds instructor who is guiding us, said that if he and his wife were relying on a hired crew, the house would cost well over $150 a square foot.

Straw bale construction is particularly suited to volunteer interns. The construction is labor-intensive, and mud and straw are a particularly forgiving medium for the amateur. By comparison, said Eric Plourde, the average price for no-frills conventional construction in Moab is over $100 per square foot.

For coming up with this affordable building model, Emily was honored this year by the White House as part of its Champions of Change program.

The owners of all three straw bale homes built so far said they loved their homes and were happy with their decision to work with Community Rebuilds, although paying the mortgage could be a challenge. Small superficial cracks in the earthen plaster are the only problem reported so far, and moisture in the bales, the biggest danger in straw bale construction, has not been an issue.

Eric Boxrud and Nancy Morlock said they actually preferred having their house built by a volunteer crew because they felt comfortable helping out with the construction and they made friends in the process. One former intern who worked on their house crashed on their couch when she came to town a few weeks ago — Nancy said she had really wanted the intern to sleep in her own creation.

We visited their home during our first week in Moab. My initial impression upon entering was an air of serenity. The thick earthen-colored walls blocked out virtually all sound from the outside and gave the space a stable and calm feel. The absence of an air-conditioning hum also helped. Although it was sweltering outside, Eric and Nancy had not yet needed to turn on their swamp cooler.

From the outside, the house looked a little squat and blocky. The wide eaves, designed to aid in passive solar design and keep rain away from the bale walls, give the appearance of a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over the face of the house.

The earth that was excavated for the foundation of the house was used in the earthen plaster on the walls and in the floors, creating a visual unity with the landscape that made the house feel organic.

Inside, the adobe floor was cozy and soft underfoot. The kitchen cabinets and hardwood island countertop looked as though they had been professionally made. The floor plan, designed without hallways by the Salt Lake City architect Wayne J. Bingham, felt larger than its square footage. The walls undulated slightly, and the deep window sills and door frames curved in a pleasing way.

The plaster detailing had subtle artistic embellishments: a two-tone ceiling with a meandering seam, for example, and a wall with what looked like ripples on a pond, surrounding a “truth window” revealing the straw beneath.

“They troweled every bit of their energy into these walls,” Eric said of the interns. “And you can feel it,” Nancy said.

Allison said she initially felt guilt over free laborers’ constructing her house. But a few days into the build, one of the interns, Tyler Shean, assured her that he wasn’t building this house just for her. He was gaining skills and knowledge that would aid his career and enrich his life.

“I feel like it’s this symbiotic relationship, where we are helping each other out,” Allison said.

Rob HarrisAllison VanLonkhuyzen, right, stopped by the site where Community Rebuilds interns are building her straw bale house.

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